12-19-2015, 10:01 AM
quote:
Originally posted by Midnight Rambler
pahoated: there are four types of mosquitos on the Big Island. If you see them land on you, you can tell them apart by how they look.
The large brown ones you refer to are Aedes japonicus; they arrived here in 2005 and are mostly found around Volcano, because they can tolerate colder temperatures than the other ones. They are mostly brown but if you get a close look you can see they have black and white striped legs like other Aedes species. They're easiest to tell apart because they're twice the size of any of the other mosquitos. It's apparently capable of transmitting some other diseases, but not dengue, or avian malaria.
Aedes albopictus is the common day-biting mosquito. It's mostly black with a single white stripe down the middle of the back, and a few other scattered white marks. Aedes aegypti is also found in a few places in Kona, but it's rare. These are the only ones that transmit dengue.
Culex quinquefasciatus is small and brown. It only comes out to bite at night, so if you get a bite at night - or if you have a hole in your screen and mosquitos flood in your house at night - these are the ones. It's the main vector of avian malaria, but don't transmit any human diseases.
Wyeomyia mitchelli is small and brown like Culex but very distinctive in sitting with the upraised middle legs curled all the way over its body, so that they're pointed forward instead of up as in all the others. It also bites during the day and only breeds water caught in bromeliads and other plants. It too doesn't transmit diseases.
So there you go. If you don't see the black-and-white mosquitos around, you don't have anything to worry about. I checked at my place in Orchidland and found there were only Wyeomyia and Culex. I think Ae. albopictus actually prefers somewhat drier places; on Oahu you find tons of them in damp-but-not-wet areas like the usually-dry shaded gulches of the Waianae mountains.
FYI
Our neighbors daughter who was diagnosed as having dengue a few weeks ago was living in Orchidland when she was diagnosed, she is represented by 3 different pins on the map, one for her home in Orchidland, one for her dad's house in HPP (even though no one there caught it) and one in lower Puna where she was working on a farm. She also does a lot of hiking and camping all over the island, so she could have caught it and spread it almost anywhere before diagnosis, although she self quarantined as soon as she knew what she had.
